1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a plastics cover for piping, and more particularly, to such a cover made not of metal sheet but of a plastics material. The cover may protectively cover the outside of a heat insulating material provided on an outer surface of a pipe e.g. for indoor air-conditioning piping typically inside a building.
2. Description of the Prior Art
For the purpose of covering a pipe for indoor piping, metal sheet covers have been substituted for the wide tapes which in the past have been spirally wound around pipes. However, it has been found that metal sheet pipe covers are unsuitable for covering indoor piping because they fail to exhibit a satisfactory finished appearance. For this reason, covers made of plastics material have been extensively used.
Unfortunately, the conventional plastics cover is not constructed in such a manner that its side edges may be simply and readily engaged with each other when it is wound on the pipe. Thus, the conventional plastics cover is formed by winding a thin or thick plastics sheet of rectangular or strip-like shape, which has a width corresponding to the circumference of a pipe, on the outer surface of the covering material mounted around the pipe, and then fixing the cover on the pipe using suitable means such as a tape, a band or the like.
Accordingly, mounting a conventional plastics cover on a pipe requires considerable labour and time because the fixing of the cover on the pipe by a tape of the like must be carried out while holding the cover by hand. As a result, the operation is highly troublesome and so the conventional plastics cover reduces the efficiency of the operation and fails to produce a good finished appearance.
Furthermore, connection between adjacent plastics covers is carried out by winding a tape on a circumferential joint between the two covers while their ends abut or overlap. This also requires much labor and time and fails to give a good finished appearance. It is also particularly difficult to connect adjacent covers in such a way as to align their edges in a longitudinal direction.